Environment

A global perspective on environmental issues. Our mission is to inform, educate, enable and create a platform for global environmental action.

Corporate leaders anticipate that the strategic use of artificial intelligence can help accelerate sustainability efforts, including the use of AI to improve…

Discover Surfrider Foundation’s 2025 State of the Beach Report, highlighting community-driven coastal solutions amidst growing climate challenges. Explore impactful case studies on local restoration efforts and policy campaigns.

Safe water improves health, saves time, and creates opportunities for women and families. Yet today, 2.2 billion people still live without it.

The land is on its way to becoming a shared regional park with connected hiking and biking trails.

A global perspective on environmental issues. Our mission is to inform, educate, enable and create a platform for global environmental action.

Some travelers may turn to carbon offsets, which allow you to essentially pay for something — like planting a tree — that in theory will make up for your share of a flight’s emissions. Those who support them say buyers have to be careful that they choose a high-quality program.

Misinformation around nutrition and health is rampant. Jonathan Kung talks about how we can use social media to combat it.

Success will go to those who follow the money, connect their work to growth and combine contextual intelligence, entrepreneurial drive and tech savviness.

FEMA is stretched thin, a GAO report warns. Its author offers advice for local leaders to respond strategically and build resilience now.

Editor’s note: The paper summarized here is part of the fall 2025 edition of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, the leading conference series and journal in economics for timely, cutting-edge research about real-world policy issues. Research findings are presented in a clear and accessible style to maximize their impact on economic understanding and policymaking. The editors are Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellows Janice Eberly and Jón Steinsson. See the fall 2025 BPEA event page to watch paper presentations and read summaries of all the papers from this edition. Submit a proposal to present at a future BPEA conference here. Climate change is already imposing modest to significant costs on U.S. households, especially affecting poorer families and households in the Gulf Coast, Florida, and some parts of the West, suggests a paper discussed at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) conference on September 26. The paper examines some, but not all, costs of climate change under two different scenarios that vary in terms of what share of weather variability is attributed to climate change. “We find sizable costs to U.S. households from recent climate change patterns, ranging from $220 to $570 each year,” write the authors, Kimberly A. Clausing of the University of California-Los Angeles School of Law, and Christopher R. Knittel and Catherine Wolfram of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. Clausing, in an interview with The Brooking Institution, said the less-conservative scenario may be “closer to the truth.” Under it, the authors write, 10% of counties “have annual household costs exceeding $880 … [and] there are large swathes of the country … where damages are concentrated and exceed $1,000 per household per year.” The paper focused on two types of climate change costs: the effects on household budgets and the effects on mortality from extreme…